Pacific Grove >> Katherine Reddick entered the national spotlight in 2013 when a scathing obituary she co-wrote with her brother about her deceased mother Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick was published in the Reno Gazette-Journal.

The writing, which recounted the constant abuse that she and her seven siblings allegedly suffered at the hands of their mother, went viral with several major outlets, such as Huffington Post and Gawker, picking up the story.

“Everyone she met, adult or child was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity, and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit,” wrote Reddick, in the notorious eulogy.

Now, the former Pacific Grove resident and Salinas educator has written and published a book about her experiences growing up in the foster care system in hopes it will spare other children from some of the harrowing episodes she endured.

When she was 7, Reddick and her siblings were permanently removed from her mother’s custody and placed in foster care. They endured a cycle of being shuffled back and forth and placed into what Reddick described as “a dysfunctional foster care system.”

Now, at age 60, Reddick, who lived in Pacific Grove in 2016 when she worked as a principal in the Salinas City School District, has released “Access Denied,” a book which chronicles not just her life at the hands of an abusive mother but her time growing up in a system where she said she suffered severe emotional abuse.

“What I found was that it’s really hard to tell the story in three seconds or even 10 minutes,” said Reddick, noting her desire for the book to not just focus on the obituary. “The foster care system is equally abusive and this addresses life in foster homes.”

While she acknowledged that there are many good foster parents, Reddick also said it’s a system that often creates unstable adults ill-equipped to cope.

“Being in eight to 10 foster homes, they don’t know how to adapt,” she said. “The foster parents don’t know how to adapt either.”

Reddick’s book recounts a variety of abuse, including the beating to death of one of her brothers at 16 months old in a foster home. It also notes the sexual abuse of many foster kids. All claims, she states, are supported by police reports, court documents and social worker notes retrieved from state archives.

“I tried to outline it in a way that didn’t make it too hard for people to read but yet still give them enough information to become compassionate about helping these kids,” she said.

Included are Reddick’s solutions to the broken system, which include her belief that boarding schools would be a better alternative to foster care because they’re places where children can access mental health services and receive the appropriate education.

She hopes that by educating people and unveiling the system’s inadequacies she’ll spark a commitment from others to help. Once a child has been in long-term foster care, they’ve most likely experienced a lot of abuse, according to Reddick.

“Our society has forgotten these kids. I don’t even know if America knows about them,” said Reddick.

“I don’t know the reason why we make animal rights more important than the rights of foster children in this country,” she said.

“If you looked at Katherine, she doesn’t look like someone who has survived all that she has,” said Laurie Lindley Muender, a marriage and family therapy intern who worked with Reddick when she was principal of El Gabilan Elementary in Salinas. “I think that she is an amazing, remarkable, insightful, compassionate woman that went to hell and back and survived.”

Reddick said it wasn’t without a lot of mistakes on her part.

“For me, growing into adulthood constantly meant seeking refuge elsewhere,” she recalled. “I left at 18 with $17 in my pocket and got married immediately. That was my only option so I looked at marriage not as marriage but as my rescue.”

Reddick, who said she’s waited all these years and hasn’t seen the system change, said that imperative to solving the problem is first acknowledging that kids are not safe in foster homes.

“I feel so sad that nobody is doing anything to help these kids,” Reddick added. “I just can’t die knowing I didn’t do something to fix the system for other children.”